Project Emperor

Prof Note

SEVEN THOUSAND SOLDIERS THAT'S JUST the number they think might be there," says Burlington Northern Professor of Asian Studies Robin Yates. "So far, they've only excavated about a thousand. They've guessed about actual numbers by determining where the trenches that hold them are and then measuring their length." The army Yates describes artisans' creations, not dead bodies spent 22 centuries underground. Each a distinctive individual from a particular region and military rank, the life-sized terra-cotta soldiers guarded the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di, near the city of Xian in China's Shaanxi province. The discovery has excited scholars since a well-digger's shovel first brought fragments to the surface in 1973, but solid information was slow to reach the West. Yates helped speed that process as a research director of Project Emperor. The project's two videodisks contain 216,000 images of the figures, the site where they were found, the Great Wall (which Qin consolidated), and interviews with Chinese archaeologists and bureaucrats. They are now available to students in Yates's freshman seminar on Qin, "The First Emperor of China," who use Project Emperor on two Macintosh work-stations in the Language Resource Center. Most of the videodisk's English narration features Yates, whose cultivated British accent brings the BBC to mind.

Yates captureda buried armyon the Mac.